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A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile
phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it.
While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a
startling amount of data, including identification about the customer,
Internet address, Facebook
page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the
coupon in the first place.

And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For
example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his
wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing
agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit”
or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell
his fiancée).

Coupons from the Internet are the fastest-growing part of the coupon
world — their redemption increased 263 percent to about 50 million
coupons in 2009, according to the coupon-processing company Inmar. Using
coupons to link Internet behavior with in-store shopping lets retailers
figure out which ad slogans or online product promotions work best, how
long someone waits between searching and shopping, even what offers a
shopper will respond to or ignore.

The coupons can, in some cases, be tracked not just to an anonymous
shopper but to an identifiable person: a retailer could know that Amy
Smith printed a 15 percent-off coupon after searching for appliance
discounts at Ebates.com on
Friday at 1:30 p.m. and redeemed it later that afternoon at the store.

“You can really key into who they are,” said Don Batsford Jr., who works
on online advertising for the tax preparation company Jackson Hewitt, whose coupons include search
information. “It’s almost like being able to read their mind, because
they’re confessing to the search engine what they’re looking for.”

While companies once had a slim dossier on each consumer, they now have
databases packed with information. And every time a person goes
shopping, visits a Web site or buys something, the database gets another
entry.

“There is a feeling that anonymity in this space is kind of dead,” said
Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and
Technology’s information privacy programs.

None of the tracking is visible to consumers. The coupons, for companies
as diverse as Ruby Tuesday and Lord & Taylor, are handled by a
company called RevTrax, which displays them on the retailers’ sites or
on coupon Web sites, not its own site.

Even if consumers could figure out that RevTrax was creating the
coupons, it does not have a privacy policy on its site — RevTrax says
that is because it handles data for the retailers and does not directly
interact with consumers. RevTrax can also include retailers’ own client
identification numbers (Amy Smith might be client No. 2458230), then the
retailer can connect that with the actual person if it wants to, for
example, to send a follow-up offer or a thank-you note.

Using coupons also lets the retailers get around Google
hurdles. Google allows its search advertisers to see reports on which
keywords are working well as a whole but not on how each person is
responding to each slogan.

“We’ve built privacy protections into all Google services and report Web
site trends only in aggregate, without identifying individual users,”
Sandra Heikkinen, a spokeswoman for Google, said in an e-mail message.

The retailers, however, can get to an individual level by sending
different keyword searches to different Web addresses. The distinct Web
addresses are invisible to the consumer, who usually sees just a Web
page with a simple address at the top of it.

So clicking on an ad for Jackson Hewitt after searching for “new 2010
deductions” would send someone to a different behind-the-scenes URL than
after searching for “Jackson Hewitt 2010,” though the Web pages and
addresses might look identical. This data could be coded onto a coupon.

RevTrax works as closely with image-rich display ads, with coupons also
signaling what ad a person saw and on what site.

“Wherever we provide a link, whether it’s on search or banner, that
thing you click can include actual keywords,” said Rob O’Neil, director
of online marketing at Tag New Media, which works with Filene’s.
“There’s some trickery.”

The companies argue that the coupon strategy gives them direct feedback
on how well their marketing is working.

Once the shopper prints an online coupon or sends it to his cellphone
and then goes to a store, the clerk scans it. The bar code information
is sent to RevTrax, which, with the ad agency, analyzes it.